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Our weekly show is hosted by Michael Nadeau (The DeFi Report) and Ryan Sean Adams (Bankless). Each week, we discuss how we approach managing our own portfolio and the data, research, and analytical frameworks that inform those decisions — for educational and informational purposes.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:10] Welcome to the report. 52% off the Bitcoin, of the Bitcoin supply, I should say, is now in red. It is July 1st, 2026. I think the big question today, this was my takeaway from the report.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:23] Do we wait for a final flush here on Bitcoin price? Or do we buy now? Mike is attempting to answer that question in today's report. The context is we are, of course, nine months into the bear market. Bitcoin is still on the week below the 200 week moving average. Some leverage has been flushed. We're not seeing the greed anymore. And the sentiment, in fact, is like kind of sad out there. Apathy market. Attention is elsewhere. And we got to figure out if now is the time to buy or should we wait for the big one? Should we wait for the big dip? Which of Mike's indicators are flashing by and which ones are saying, slow down, wait, it might not be the end yet. We'll give the case for accumulating and the case for keeping some of that powder dry. Stick around to the end. This is my favorite part of the report. We get to forecast potential future returns. So the last time people bought Bitcoin in 2018 and the 2022 cycle, when it was here at this price with these KPIs, what did future returns look like? We're going to look at one year two years three years see what the potential rewards might be for all the patients mike has been advising us to take uh mike before we get into today's episode i gotta ask you like the question i asked in the intro just give me the the highest level gun to gun to your head version okay do we wait for one more flush or do we buy now
Michael Nadeau:
[1:49] I think you want to be buying now. So I think, you know, that intro you just put together, I can tell you've been reading the reports because I think it, summarizes my views very well. I think you want to be buying now and we'll get into why we think, you know, that's the case. Also, you know, if you're trying to maximize the amount of, you know, tokens that you can buy, the amount of Bitcoin you can buy or your other favorite assets, you know, there's a chance that we could see lower prices sometime sometime later. We'll see. We've been in this 28% or so downtrend since early May. And so I could see the setup here potentially shifting in the other direction. We'll see. But a lot of the work that I've been doing and people that have been following the work is really around just assessing where the risk is at all points of the cycle and sort of aligning the portfolio to where we think that is. So we want to have some risk in play when We're sort of at the top of the market when we think maybe things are going to roll over. We're sort of at the other end of that now where we want to be allocated, but we also are trying to keep some cash behind because as we'll get to in the report, there's still some potential for some more pain out there.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:00] I'm going to ask you near the end if you're happy, how happy you are with the TDR portfolio construction, what you like and what you might change. But we'll get to that near the end. First, we got to shout out our friends and sponsors over at Galaxy. This one is for the institutions, the institutional capital listening, whether you are looking at the future of finance, that is crypto, or the next industrial revolution that's quite obviously AI. Galaxy is the name you need to know. They are a global leader in both of these areas, digital finance, of course, and also AI. On the digital finance crypto side of things, they do institutional grade trading, custody, and also tokenization services. On the AI side, they have massive data centers, including their Heliosite, 1.6 gigawatts of approved power. And they are a publicly traded company, one of crypto's finance. The ticker is
Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:51] GLXY. And you can find out more about them in the show notes. Thank you so much to Galaxy for sponsoring this. Go check out how they help institutions invest, build, and transform relentlessly. All right. Bitcoin price on the week. We were down when I started reading the report below 59K. We have since popped back up to 60K, but we've been kind of floating in this range, 53% or so from the top. Feels like it's near a cycle low. We are trading below the 200-week moving average. We don't spend a lot of time here during Bitcoin's history. So this is kind of a key moment, I suppose. The 200-week moving average is 62K, 62.4K. And also, we are down 28% since May 10th, since that time in April and early May when people thought that the bull market was returning. They were not quite correct on the timing. You gave some insights that you thought
Ryan Sean Adams:
[4:53] we were in for a bit more pain. And indeed, we've felt some of that pain. Let's look at the scorecard, okay, you present at the very beginning of today's report. So this is that famous cycle awareness KPI table. We look at the 2018 KPI lows, the 2022 lows from previous cycles, and today, the numbers have changed quite a bit. Tell us what you see when you look at this table.
Michael Nadeau:
[5:19] What I see here is sort of what we were saying at the intro here is like, this tells me like it's a pretty good time to be buying. I think if you focus on maybe the bottom four there, so percentage of supply and profit, 48%. So more than half of the holders out there are experiencing unrealized losses right now. So this is historically a good time to buy. When we look at the long-term holder supply and profit, it's even lower. Again close to where we got to in the prior bear market lows, when we look at like the sort of 12 month rsi long-term momentum number, that's at 38.9 again like very much in line with the lows of the last two cycles and then as you mentioned, bitcoin's trading below its 200 week moving average that's the long-term four-year moving average that we touched in 2018, did not go below it we did go significantly below it in 2022 and and we've now uh hit that level and we've we're now we've been sort of trading below that for a little bit and we actually had a monthly close below the 200 week moving average so, That all tells me, like, I think you've got the green light to, you know, be allocating, especially on a, you know, longer term, one to three years. So time horizon, I think it's a green light.
Michael Nadeau:
[6:41] If we look at the sort of top metrics there, those are the ones that maybe look like there could be a little more pain to come. This is where we talk about the realized price for Bitcoin. It's around $54K.
Michael Nadeau:
[6:52] We haven't quite got to that level. Historically, we have dropped below the realized price. That's the proxy for sort of the average cost basis of all the coins in the network. So that's one that looks like maybe there's a little pain. The Z score is just.
Michael Nadeau:
[7:07] Looking at sort of the deviation from historical norms. And again, you know, it just looks like maybe there could be a little more pain there. We've talked a lot about the realized cap, which is kind of a way to think about the proxy for the total capital invested in the network. That has just not declined as much as you would expect to see, which is really telling you that there hasn't been enough like capital destroyed or there hasn't been as much capital destroyed so far, about 265 days into this bear market, as we saw in the past, too. So those are the ones that, you know, look like maybe, you know, we just haven't had enough coin rotation, that type of thing. And, you know, part of what I'm doing when I look at this data and this scorecard, is also trying to factor in, like, how is market structure shifting for Bitcoin? We have the ETFs now, 6% of the supply is in those ETFs, which means that like 6% of what we would typically capture in this on-chain data, KPIs, is sort of out of our purview. It's happening in the ETFs. It's sort of like a centralized player where we don't actually get to see the coins, you know, shuffling hands and that type of thing. So we have to factor that in a little bit.
Michael Nadeau:
[8:23] And, you know, the ETFs are seeing significant pain happening there. We're now down 10% in terms of AUM on the ETFs. So maybe some of, you know, what's not being expressed in these on-chain KPIs, you know, is being captured there.
Michael Nadeau:
[8:40] We've also just you know on a consistent basis been looking at sort of these cost basis cohorts to try to assess have enough of the coins rotated hands like that we would typically see, and I would say like the top sort of buyer top buyer cohort we call them, that's the people that bought between 108 and 126k in the in the last cycle last year, about 50 of those coins are rotated hands I think that's that feels like it's it's pretty pretty healthy in terms of like setting those those macro lows but the cohort below them we can see that highlighted 16.5 percent there, that still looks like you know there needs to be, some more coins uh rotated and what we haven't seen and this is like something i i kind of think does have to happen to have more clear confirmation that the.
Michael Nadeau:
[9:32] This sort of rapid reshuffling of tokens, which we tend to see at the bear market lows. That's when spot volumes really increase. And we just have a ton of activity. I mean, this played out after FTX in the last cycle. And I think if you're anchoring to that, then maybe you need some sort of catalyst to get you there. And maybe we can talk a little about like what would those potential catalysts you know potentially look like but but i'll pause there and just to to get your views but i think you know from my perspective, you know when you're under the 200 week moving average the bitcoin like you said bitcoin does not trade there very often and historically that's a that's a pretty good spot to be, so we're you know tilting the portfolio to be risk on and then trying to assess whether or not these other risks are strong enough to say, let's keep a significant amount of cash back to potentially, you know, really buy the lows, really buy that fear later. So anyways, that's kind of the high level of sort of how we're tracking these KPIs.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[10:40] I think that's a fantastic answer. I guess the thing that still I'm trying to understand, so four of the six KPIs are screaming that this is a cycle low. The holdouts are realized cap and MVRV. Those are kind of the two holdouts. Why are they still holding out? Like, in other words, can you help us make sense of these metrics? What has to happen? Do we have to go lower or does more time just have to, you know, like we have to get more weeks and months of this bear under our belt for that to shift into the previous cycle low territory?
Michael Nadeau:
[11:16] Yeah. So I think in terms of like the sort of capital destruction increase in realized losses that we really haven't seen on par with past cycles so far. I think for that to happen, that's really like we need to see coins rotating hands. And that's the anchor for those metrics to start to come in line with past cycles.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:37] So it's not time and it's not necessarily price of Bitcoin, right? It's some of that activity, some of that cohort rotation activity that you'd want to see on chain, as we see in the market structure update section. And that shuffling has to happen for MVRV and decline in realized cap to meet the previous cycle lows. And you haven't seen that on chain yet.
Michael Nadeau:
[12:01] We haven't seen it like at a really high level. And I think there's two ways you can get there. You can get there like in a sort of more capitulatory event. There's some sort of risk reintroducing the market credit event, you know, whatever it is. I'm not sure what it could be, but there's some event like FTX where that plays out. And in Bitcoin, actually, the price corrects significantly as it plays out. The other way it can play out is, you know, the lows could be in. You could sort of say, well, wait a minute. What if the low is in 58K or so? And we have like maybe another retracement move here. You know, we've been we're down 28 percent or so from like early May. And this sort of like downtrend is now, you know, almost two months into it. So I could see like a mean reversion where we start to trend up. If Bitcoin starts trending up into the mid 60s, upper 60s, we could see some people just lose patience and start to sell their coins and just things can kind of rotate on their own. I tend to anchor to the idea that like, you still need that sort of fear, you know, to kind of really get the coins moving. So the setup to me kind of looks like we're going to see a little retracement here. Could be wrong. Short-term views, I've kind of low conviction on.
Michael Nadeau:
[13:22] And sort of then the narrative, it starts to shift towards the bottom as in kind of what we saw earlier in the cycle. And then, you know, we're really kind of looking at like, are we going to be able to get above like the short-term holder cost basis, the 200-day moving average, the metrics that we were looking at, back in, you know, March and April when we were experiencing that retracement rally, those will start to come in as sort of upside resistance again. And then we'll see, you know, if there's some catalyst. But it could be a capitulation. Or it could just be, you know, the time-based thing, like you mentioned, where people just get impatient, they sell into the rallies, they take their losses, and they move on. And that's how we set the low. I tend to think that, like, it's healthier to get, like, a real kind of rotation, like a real capitulatory event. And then that really kind of sets the healthy base for the next expansion.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:15] Well, help us recall, we had a capitulation event quite clearly in 2022. That was SBF. That was the capitulation event. But the other data point we have, which is 2018, I don't recall a stark capitulation event precisely. It was more kind of that apathy, like exhaustion, like that just months went on. And, you know, every rally was just like slapped down by the bears and we just kind of kept going lower. It was more like that in 2018. So maybe we're a little anchored to 2022 with
Ryan Sean Adams:
[14:46] a capitulation event, expecting Sailor to be the SBF of this cycle. And really it'll happen the way it happened in 2018 which is kind of like this bleed out and exhaustion type thing but if there is a capitulation type event let's talk about where that could come from we've already talked so much about sailor we don't need to um address that one thing i was thinking as i was reading the port is like um is it ai what happens if we see an ai top and that bubble let's say it's a bubble I mean some some 20 to 25 percent sell-off on the Nasdaq or something okay like that can't be good for Bitcoin price could that be the capitulation type event of this cycle or if not that one I guess how do you wait that one and if not that one what else do you see that could be on the horizon
Michael Nadeau:
[15:37] Yeah, I think that's kind of where my attention is shifting. I think you're right that the sailor stuff, I saw that strategy put out a framework for how they're going to try to manage their credit products moving forward. I think they have, it was 2.3 billion or so, I want to say roughly 18 months of cash shored up. And now they're basically saying, hey, we're setting aside 1.3 billion that we might sell Bitcoin. And so the market kind of can say, okay, they have enough for the next few years. We'll see. I kind of think that may just sort of kind of go away, especially if Bitcoin price kind of just steadies here. So that's to me less of a risk. I think you're right to say that. And, what is the sort of setup here when I think, when I look out the next three, four months, I think there's like kind of three main risks. This is more like kind of macro stuff, but I think you have the inflation issue. That's ongoing. And the market seems to be moving past the war in Iran. We have the latest ceasefire news. Oil prices are down significantly around $70, not too high from where the war started, which is pretty wild to think about.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:52] It's been surprising to me.
Michael Nadeau:
[16:55] Yeah, I think that's surprising as well. My view on that, and this is no skin in the game on this, It feels to me like the energy markets might actually be in kind of like a secular, bull market that's coming here. And this is not just a return to $60, $70 oil. So that'll be interesting to follow. But I think what I'm more focused on is the new Fed president and sort of how they're going to deal with inflation moving forward. It's kind of a tough read because the Fed's new policy is really more about, like lack of forward guidance. So the market sort of has to figure this out, which I think is actually a good thing. And what I'm looking at there is kind of the two-year yield. We've talked about this in the past where the Fed funds rate tends to follow the two-year yield. That's trading at like 4.2%. So it's kind of out of the kind of Fed funds rate band. And it'll be interesting to see if that sort of stays the anchor.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:05] But that tells us then if that's higher than the FFR, the Fed funds rate, then the Fed funds rate has to go up, right? So that would mean Warsh is moving in the upwards direction?
Michael Nadeau:
[18:18] I think so. I think this is kind of the base case. in the market per the CME Fed watch. So the market is currently pricing in a 70% chance of a hike in September in the September meeting. So that, That's interesting because that's kind of already baked into the cake in some ways. That's pretty strong odds there. And I think the market is starting to come to this acceptance that inflation needs to be dealt with. And the whole narrative that the new Fed president was going to come in and just crush rates is just not the reality here. Yeah.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:52] Is Trump aware of that?
Michael Nadeau:
[18:56] I don't know if he's being asked about it. I did see him make a few comments that he was fine with when he didn't lower rates in the first meeting. So we'll see if that starts to become an issue similar to how it was with Powell. But I think, you know, if you can kind of consider that, okay, the market's really already pricing in one rate hike, what would, you know, sort of cause the market to the wall of worry to grow further? I think it's, you know, that the Fed is actually like really gung-ho about getting inflation back to 2%, which, you know, hard to say again, but I'm starting to think that they may be. And so basically, if you have a situation where one rate hike isn't going to actually get that done, and then the narrative starts turning to, oh, wait a minute, they're dead serious about this. They're going to do as many hikes as it takes. Now the market has to price that. And that's, Maybe that causes equities to sell off a little bit going later into Q3, into Q4. So that's one risk, I think, that sits out there.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[20:04] I will call to mind, that's kind of how the 2000 internet.com bubble ended with some great hikes at the top.
Michael Nadeau:
[20:12] Right. And we know this is kind of reminiscent a little bit of 2022 when the Fed had to hike. And we know that that was not good for the crypto markets. So that's one thing I think, um, Part of that story, you know, you have the sort of midterms coming in the U.S. This is just, I think, I don't know if the market is really pricing this as a risk, but it just started to feel to me like.
Michael Nadeau:
[20:42] We have populism on both sides. It's not going anywhere. And it looks like the pendulum is swinging left to me right now. And so the market may have to start to price in like, you know, a divided government. And what that starts to mean for, you know, the Trump administration and their policies, the ability to actually push new laws through starting in next year. And also, you know, potentially just a very combative Congress where, you know, investigations are being opened up into the Trump administration, things are being blocked. And so I think the market will sort of look at that and, OK, that's just political stuff. That's not a big deal. But how that impacts the business environment and, you know, that potentially starting to get priced in, it may not be a big deal for the midterms. And maybe this becomes a bigger issue in 2028 with the next, presidential election. But I just feel like there's building risks there. This is where the AI trade, I think, starts to come into this a little bit.
Michael Nadeau:
[21:45] Potential regulatory fears, you know, we've seen proposals about the government, getting involved in ownership of these companies, which historically that is not good for evaluations and things like that. So I think just on the political side, like there's some building risks here.
Michael Nadeau:
[22:06] So that kind of gets, you know, folded into what the Fed's doing. Now you've got a little bit more of a concoction of like, you know, potentially risk off move. And then the other thing I'm paying attention to is, you know, we talked about Iran and how that's impacting oil prices. And we've seen oil prices come down or gas prices come down in the U.S., I don't think that's the case right now in the sort of Asian markets where the supply constraints are much more serious. And this is where, you know, where Japan starts to come into play where they have a very weak yen right now. And so the USD versus yen is starting to break out. The dollar is rising, yen is weak, even though the BOJ recently hiked rates to 1%, which is the highest level in three decades. But you would think that them hiking rates might cause that chart to come down. It's not. The yen is staying very weak. And this sort of gets interesting if this inflation problem and this oil story continues to develop.
Michael Nadeau:
[23:16] It looks to me like you have a stagflationary setup in Japan where they're going to have to actually get more aggressive in hiking rates. And then that impacts these carry trades globally where investors borrow cheaply in yen, take that capital, go into U.S. markets. And so if the rates are coming up in Japan, investors may look at that trade and say, wait a minute, we need to sort of get out of some of that. So that's another thing. Again, all of these things are sort of potentially colliding, I think, coming into Q3, potentially early Q4. And this could be the thing that sort of, you know, brings Bitcoin down with it, but possibly I have sort of, you know, low to moderate conviction, I would say on all of this, you know, starting to come together. But I think if I'm looking at assessing risks, these are the ones that I'm paying most attention to right now.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:08] And all three of those could be pinpricks, I suppose, that lead to an equity sell-off that fuel a final leg down and final, I guess, sell-off of crypto assets that you might want to look for and that would hit the realized price numbers, let's say. But yeah, the interesting thing was about populism. You talked about that. And I appreciate that you introduced this chart, which is consumer sentiment over time, over the last 10 years. And it is at all-time lows over the last 10 years. And I've never really gotten a sufficient explanation for this chart of why. I mean, other signals in the economy seem relatively healthy. Why is consumer sentiment at all-time lows? It wasn't even lower in COVID. And your reason for that is like, well, you could see this in political risk and instability with some of the rise of populism, certainly on the left now, also on the right. And that could be part of the pinprick. Imagine a Gary Gensler style anti-AI government that starts to squash some of the equity's gains. That could maybe send us over the edge and do it. But are there any other explanations for consumer sentiment that you've seen that are good? Like, why is it like this? It seems like a mystery.
Michael Nadeau:
[25:24] It's a fascinating topic, I think. That chart, it is actually at all-time lows, I think, going back to 1950 or so when this came out. And that chart historically has followed the stock market, right? So there's a total Jaws diversion right now with the stock market's all-time highs, consumer sentiment, all-time lows. And, yeah, I think you have to sort of look at that. And then you look at the populism and the way things are getting expressed. I sort of view like the populism on both sides is the same thing. It's just people are not unhappy. People are unhappy with their circumstances. And they're just choosing to sort of based on their ideology, they choose the opponent. And, you know, to me, it's just something's off. I don't really can't really put my finger on it myself. But it's clear that things are off. And the social fabric is there's something off in the social fabric. We are seeing this get expressed, you know, in politics. And you know I'm not old enough to like kind of go back and I wish you know I talked to older people hey have you ever seen this type of like kind of angst you know just in the political sphere, and like most people I talk to are say this is different like they've never really seen it.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[26:44] That's because it may not have happened previously you know like since the 1930s you
Michael Nadeau:
[26:48] Know right right so not that many people that are living today have experienced it and so it is hard to kind of put your finger on. And yeah, there could be some risk embedded in this that's hard for us to sort
Michael Nadeau:
[27:00] of forecast just because nobody's really seen it.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:02] The consumer sentiment numbers mean something. And I think that the populist explanation is as good as any that I've heard. Let's talk about returns. So over the past many weeks of this bear market, one of the repeated phrases you've used is patience, be patient. Okay. Let's talk about what patience, what the reward for patience can actually be. And you put this fantastic table at the bottom of today's report, Bitcoin supply and profit at 48%. And that's where we are today. So if you had purchased equivalently to where we are today, Bitcoin supply and profit at 48% in the 2018 bear market, the 2020 market where it hit that number as well as 2022, you could forecast what the returns would have looked like. If we just put that on today, it's kind of a proxy for if we bought today, what could our returns look like in one year, two year, and three year time slot? So tell us about that. What does it look like from here?
Michael Nadeau:
[28:12] It looks good. I mean, you know, again, this is historical data, you know, past, you know, performance isn't, you know, necessarily telling you what's gonna happen in the future, but I think it's a good anchor. And, you know, we've talked about how like, you know, maybe 60k Bitcoin is kind of like 20k Bitcoin from from last cycle. And I think this analysis shows that the returns are really good over, you know, one to three years. So if you were buying, you know, sort of the end of the site, this is November, uh, 2018. So it wasn't even the lows, uh, Um, your one year return was 78%. Your two year return was 367%. And your three year was over, you know, 13x. So, you know, that was earlier in Bitcoin sort of maturity. So those returns are much higher than we would expect them to be going forward. But even in 2020, this was kind of the COVID lows.
Michael Nadeau:
[29:00] 10x in a year, you know, when we hit these levels, those that came down a little bit over two, three years, but still really strong returns. And then, you know, sub 20k Bitcoin last cycle, you were up, as we've talked about, the goal of being patient is, you want to be buying at a level where the price can almost, this is getting harder as Bitcoin matures, but if you were buying sub 20K, around 20K last cycle, you were up 100% before the market had come to the conclusion that we were in a bull market. So then once that kicks into gear, all the media attention, everything that comes with that, you're just riding a wave. And that's, that's the goal is to get in at the right prices where, um, you can be, you can be comfortably up before the market even really turns. And that's, so that's the goal here. And, you know, this tells me like, you don't need to be too patient. We're at, we're below the 200 week moving average. Uh, everything tells me like, you know, you might have to be a little patient in terms of getting those, those returns. You might have to wait a year. You could go down a little bit in the interim. But from a historical perspective, these are pretty good levels to allocate at.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:13] So if you believe in Bitcoin, Bitcoin is cheap, historically. Bitcoin is cheap. If you don't believe in Bitcoin, you're probably not listening
Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:20] to the DDR report. So it's a cheap time to buy. Let's talk about some key levels here. And maybe I'll just consolidate this by asking you this question. This is more on the downside. If you were to set a single Bitcoin limit order right now at a price point, what would that price point be?
Michael Nadeau:
[30:42] Probably 55K would be one, and then probably a little off of 50K would be another. I tend to actually not use these for the most part, but I think...
Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:54] Why don't you? I was curious about that. Yeah. Because why don't you set some limit orders and just let them ride, and you know what the numbers look like? You seem to be a bit more... You use these numbers, but then it's kind of partially an instinct in terms of what to buy.
Michael Nadeau:
[31:11] It is. Yeah, it's definitely more of an instinct and like assessing things as they're playing out, having a plan ahead of time and then assessing things as they play out. If I'm going to be traveling on the road or something, definitely we'll use those. But if I know I'm going to be at my desk, it's something where, you know, we kind of have a plan in place and then we're assessing as we go. And so that's kind of I don't know it's just I think investing is very personal and it's just kind of like that's just kind of my style I find that if I, um just sort of set it and forget it on things I it just maybe it's a control thing or something it just feels like a little too like uh distant for me I need to be in there I need to be in the game so yeah it's a personal thing but you know nothing against you know setting those those orders um, but yeah I think in terms of like, you know, where we're going here, the upside resistance in the near term is, you know, the 200 week moving average. So we had a monthly close below that, which is kind of a significant thing. Like we may now just be in a channel here where we're below the 200 week. And it's kind of hard to figure out where the anchor on the lower end is if we stay in that channel.
Michael Nadeau:
[32:22] If we do sort to have a retracement rally, which I think is probably more probable than not here in the near term, then I think we would probably get above the 200 week. And then the upside resistance there is probably like roughly 70K or so, which is the short-term holder cost basis. So we could trade in that range. I could see us trading in that, chopping around during the summer months in that range. The 200-day moving average, which we did hit back in early May, That's now come down to 75K or so. So that's probably like your upper, upper limit. True market mean is around the same level. But I think that's kind of the setup here. And then we'll see if we have, you know, what that looks like if we do have a retracement rally. Are we seeing sort of inpatient investors selling into that? Do we see all the things we were looking at back in March, April? Are we seeing durable spot activity? Are we seeing a shift in sentiment?
Michael Nadeau:
[33:20] All the things that would tell me, okay, maybe the lows are in, that's what we'll be looking for. But otherwise, you know, we've been doing these shows and, you know, just updating and really following what we consider kind of like this cycle awareness type of work. And a lot of this is, you know, data-driven work that we're comparing to kind of past cycles. And this one has tracked very closely to the past. And so I just, I have a hard time fading that, you know, the lows aren't coming sort of later in the bear market or roughly nine months in. Historically, there are greater opportunities, you know, 12 or so months in. And, you know, it's just when you get to, when you've waited this, when you've been patient and selectively allocating, it would just be, it would be tough to kind of, have an opportunity to buy really cheap Bitcoin and just be out of cash. So I'm trying to keep some behind so that we can buy the lows and just feel really good about kind of where the portfolio is as the market turns. But like, let's keep in mind that, Once we hit those lows, like it's going to take some time as well to sort of recover and start to, it's not like we're just going to go into a bold market. There tends to be, it's kind of a recovery period and, you know, we'll see, we'll be assessing new risks and all that as that comes. But that's kind of how I'm thinking about it right now.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[34:43] And when we hit the lows, none of you will feel like buying. That's what the lows feel like. You just do not feel like buying in those moments. But Mike, you've been calling it very well this cycle and all the tools that you've used have led us to a fantastic point here. And basically, I've got to say over the past months of doing this with you, you've called it very well so far. So the tools you're using must be working.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:08] The fundamentals you're assessing are pointing to something. We'll ground folks in this as you put at the end of today's report. In each bear cycle, Bitcoin has established a higher low in terms of max drawdown. So remember these numbers. We went 84% down in 2018, 76% in 2022, 54% so far in 2026. Now, if the ultimate max drawdown, that kind of final capitulation scenario, if that's in line with 2022 and 2018, maybe we see something like a 68% max drawdown to 40K. Don't count on it, but that's possible. And that would be in line with previous sell-offs from the very top. Good time to buy. Also, have a little dry powder for one of these events. There's more in the report. it, I should say, but I promise to keep this brief with Mike today. He's got to get to the beach.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:05] He's got some more insight on portfolio construction for the TDR portfolio, including what he's most happy with, some of the purchases he's most happy with, and some of the things that you would have done differently if you could. So if you want access to that, you have to become a TDR Pro member. The good news is you could do that for free right now.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:26] Click a link in the show notes. There is a one month trial. You can access this report, see into Mike's portfolio, see what he's thinking about the next months to come and get insight into that. And then of course, once you get that free trial, I predict you will become a TDR Pro member, maybe for life.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:45] We'll leave folks with that. Mike, have fun at the beach.
Michael Nadeau:
[36:48] Gotta let you guys know. Just one, just add in, Ryan, before I wrap up. So I'm also gonna be publishing a report on like kind of the learnings mistakes. Like I'm going to assess kind of everything that's played out. So we're going to actually publish a report on that. So people can have that. Ooh, special report. If you're coming in new. And then we have Ethereum, Solana, Hyperliquid. We have a bunch of quarterly reports coming out. So we're doing Ethereum this quarter. A lot of interesting stuff happening with real world assets right now. We're getting into a lot of that in the quarterly reports for Ethereum and Solana as well. So that's all coming.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:22] All right, guys, got to end with this. None of this has been financial advice. This is the Investor Journal. As you know, we're on the journey alongside you. Until next time, got to stay curious.